Summation of Recent Work

Since this summer, Mass Proletariat engaged in a work place struggle
in Boston. The struggle comprised two fronts: struggle against the
oppression of the workers at the hands of the reactionary capitalists,
and the struggle to show the basis for revolutionary politics among
the workers in the face of the dominant ideology of reform and
trade-unionism. Before we joined the struggle there were positive
elements in the workers’ ranks. They had recently overwhelmingly voted
down a poor contract that management claimed was their “best and final
offer.” This confrontation displayed a sharpening of contradictions in
the workplace. Also, several comrades had participated in actions
organized by the workers at the site. Through this work, these
comrades had developed links with the workers, which enabled them to
coordinate initial meetings and investigation of the situation.

Our engagement in the struggle made clear to us that the strengthening of
proletarian organization and development of mass struggle are two separate
processes, mutually reinforced and dialectically related by the united front.
In this document we describe how our understanding of developed through the
course of the struggle.

The Development of the Struggle

Our involvement in this struggle can be divided into three periods, an early,
middle, and late period. The early period saw the initial development of
contacts with the workers and the beginning of organized protests. The middle
period saw qualitative changes in the character of the protests, the
development of a united front, and expanded outreach and participation among
the workers. The late stage saw further developments in the protests and
a setback in the local situation, in the form of signing a ‘sugar coated
bullet’ of a contract.

Background

In the mid 1990’s the workers successfully completed a drive to join a big
mainstream union, pushing against major opposition by management. Shortly
afterwards, however, the parent union’s collaborationist policies were exposed
when it went over the workers’ heads to make back-door deals with the bosses.
The workers decided to call a vote to de-ratify the union, and they formed an
independent union instead, which just represents their shop. This is the union
which still represents the workers today.

When we began our involvement, the workers had been without a contract for over
a year, and management had put forward a series of contract offers which would
have gutted the union and rolled back gains won in earlier struggles. The
capitalists were using scabs to replace the unionized staff. The existing
workers were in turn given the false choice of acceding to demands to work
overtime—supposedly to slow their replacement by scabs. In addition, their
former “privileges” were methodically eliminated, including using the bathroom
without permission, and the ability to sit down while on the job. Workers were
under increased scrutiny by management, who tracked them by increased video
surveillance. They were also repeatedly written up on phony charges. These
disciplinary measures coupled with a hiring freeze reduced the workforce by one
third. These oppressive tactics were justified by management’s claim that
workers were not “doing a good job.”

Prior to our involvement, the union (and the leadership of the union in
particular) had organized weekly protests to advocate for their cause, saying
they should receive a “fair” contract. Other outside forces (leftists and parts
of the local anarcho-syndicalist scene) also had been a regular part of these
dominantly trade-unionist rallies. After the union voted down the workplace’s
so-called ‘best and final offer’ the union leadership largely withdrew from the
struggle, and these protests were also halted. When we started meeting with the
staff at the site, there were only 2 or 3 workers who would come out to
protest, with the rest of the workforce retreating from the struggle,
dispirited by the long stretch without a contract, and dominantly not
enthusiastic about resuming the fight.

Early Stage

After hearing about the contract vote we reached out to our contacts among the
workers and coordinated meetings to develop a greater understanding of the
situation, to deepen these links, and to plan our strategy. Through early
meetings we developed a relationship with a relatively advanced worker who had
been urging his coworkers to oppose the injustices and oppression that they
faced at the hands of management. We also met with some workers from the union
leadership, in the hopes that, despite a dominant trade-unionist orientation,
these individuals could play a positive role. They initially expressed
excitement about our engagement, but quickly dropped contact with us,
representative of a dominant pattern of opportunism that was relatively
consistent throughout our engagement. The union’s established practice viewed
the protests primarily as a matter of outreach, aimed at garnering public
support for the workers’ “economic” struggle. This trade-unionist approach
placed certain limits on the efficacy of protesting, and especially on its
ability to address internal contradictions among the workers. Workers were
encouraged to behave as good bourgeois subjects, who avoided pushing the limits
of “acceptable” action, while simultaneously framing the struggle as primarily
about acquiring a contract rather than about the content of contracts or about
the wider struggle. This dynamic was further reinforced by the fact that many
of the rank-and-file workers were first generation oppressed nationality
immigrants of proletarian class origin, whereas the a majority of union
“leaders” were white, college educated and from a petite-bourgeois class
background. The union leadership also organized bi-monthly meetings, but they
were not well attended and skirted around the central political issues that
were on people’s minds. We identified the inability of workers to engage with
the struggle based on their own initiative and correct ideas as a primary
contradiction. Through meetings with a relatively advanced worker, we mapped
out a plan to regularly discuss these ideas with workers at weekly protests.

Thus, one of our first struggles was over the orientation of these protests;
against the trade-unionist line, we pushed for the protests to be primarily
oriented towards developing internal clarity over the nature of the struggle.
This included focusing on opportunities to develop further links with other
workers who attended the demonstrations (primarily during their lunch breaks at
this point in the struggle), developing new signs, fliers, and chants with
a more militant orientation, and seeing engagement with the public as secondary
to internal discussion and confrontation with supervisors and administrators.
Later, we would push to redraw the lines of acceptable limits for protests, but
at this time we were still developing a basic understanding of the
contradictions at play.

Discussion with the workers had a two-fold character. It was necessary to
develop the political understanding of the workers and to discuss their correct
ideas about the situation, and also necessary to develop links among the
workers through building relationships. These two objectives are in
contradiction. Many of our mass links felt isolated, facing and reproducing
a general unwillingness to challenge the status quo, on the job and in the
union. As a result, we spent a good deal of time discussing the revolutionary
basis for them to put forward correct ideas in the struggle, even when in the
minority. The contradictory role of discussion led us, at times, to
overemphasize the difficulties and barriers to developing the initiative and
participation of workers in the struggle. The impediments to the development of
mass initiative can appear as objective constraints, but this is merely the
appearance-form; militant subjective intervention can overcome these barriers
and transform the situation in the process. Through sharply rendering the
contours of this contradiction individual comrades were better able to grapple
with developing and emerging contradictions in discussions and protests.

At this point we were mainly organizing protests with a small group of the
workers independently of union leadership. Although the union leadership was
aware of the work we were doing, and had shown up to a few events and meetings,
their participation was minimal and lukewarm. They would suddenly take
a frantic interest in organizing, scheduling events and actions, only to show
up at the very end of the event or not at all. We determined at this point that
we could not rely on them to play the consistent role necessary to build and
sustain initiative over the course of a struggle.

While we saw the workers’ initiative as primary in the development of their
power, we also understood that in order to develop a proletarian pole it was
necessary to incorporate outside forces. Prior to our involvement, union
leadership had encouraged outsiders to display “solidarity” at pickets. This
trade-unionist strategy relegated “support” to a slot in a formalistic
technical division of labor, which could not play a positive role. Together
with our core contacts we developed a strategy for engaging students,
progressive intellectuals, and workers from other workplaces, emphasizing
qualitative aspects of participation over quantitative accumulation of
forces.Our hope was that outsiders could participate in a manner which
facilitated all around political development and built up mass initiative.

Middle Stage

The regular participation of a few other workers provided us with the basis to
coordinate a more comprehensive strategy. While we had made some progress,
there was a need for the workers to take a leading role. In order to address
this contradiction, we developed a newsletter which featured content written by
the workers. We also shifted the time of our protests from the middle of the
day (when only a few workers could join on their lunch breaks) to the
transition between first and second shift. This allowed us to engage with the
second shift workers as they arrived and the first shift workers as they left.

During these protests (which took place by the staff entrance of the workplace)
we also sought to push the limits of acceptable action. One means of doing so
was protesting in the driveway, instead of on the sidewalk, but moving to allow
vehicles to pass. This drew the immediate attention of management, who sent
a supervisor out to tell us to move. While one of the workers quickly
acquiesced, another stood up, and told the manager that we weren’t doing
anything wrong. Comrades and other workers quickly joined in, and the manager
retreated back inside the workplace. This confrontation, and others, began to
expose divisions among the workers, and demonstrated the importance of
understanding how people, including those in our group of militants, have the
potential to play positive or negative roles depending on their overall clarity
of the situation, and on their class orientation.

As participation in protests increased, so did the oppression the workers
faced. Black, Latinx, female, and older workers all began to face a greater
degree of scrutiny in their daily work and were often written up on phony
charges. One worker was placed on final warning for “sleeping” during role
call, despite the fact that he was standing up and camera footage showed that
his eyes were open. Additionally, two of the workers who played a leading role
throughout the struggle were written up on phony charges, likely in response to
their involvement.

At this time we deepened our outreach to other forces in the area, including
radical students engaged in other mass struggles. A number of students got
involved in the workplace struggle when we joined an occupation to protest
climate change at a nearby university, arranged for a worker to speak at the
encampment, and invited the students there to join in the workplace
demonstrations. We strove to clarify the difference between a revolutionary and
reformist approach in both our respective struggles through discussion and
debate. This helped us to identify advanced elements in the student movements,
and helped clarify to the student contacts the importance of discussion and
debate to determine political line and provide a way forward for political
action.

Around this time a larger protest was organized at an all-night session at the
workplace. This was a key moment in the struggle, in part because these
all-night events were staffed by scabs instead of the union workers. Galvanized
by the testimony of a worker, a number of student contacts attended this
protest, and it played a key role in their political development. Shortly after
the protest began we were confronted by one of the scabs who told us that we
had to move our signs, which were on the workplace’s property. A few of the
students immediately went to comply, but we stopped them and instead began to
yell “scabs go home.” The scab was quite surprised by our militancy, and was
briefly driven back, only to return a few minutes later with another scab.
Again they were shouted down, with some of the students joining in. The scabs
then retreated. This is one example of the two line struggle that played out
among our comrades at the event.

After shouting down the scabs, there was a question of how to go forward.
Through some quick discussion we decided to surround a table that the scabs had
set up to promote positive public relations; this forced them to pack up their
table and retreat off the sidewalk. We then blocked the entrance and covered
their signs with our own. This was a key protest for the political development
of our contacts and comrades, clarifying the need for struggle over the
contradictions at hand to discern the way forward. It also helped them to
understand the importance of struggling to push the limits of acceptable action
at protest, and challenged the petite-bourgeois ideology of uncritical
acceptance of authority.

Late Stage

To this point, the union leadership had only been marginally involved in the
struggle. A few brief appearances at protests (often staying for 15 minutes or
less) and an occasional Facebook comment about the development of the struggle
was the limit of their presence. Participation by the rank-and-file workers, in
contrast, had grown significantly, with a number regularly attending protests
and additional workers joining our weekly discussions. A pending arbitration
meeting, and the deepening contradiction between the active participation of
the rank-and-file workers and the non-participation of the leadership, pushed
the leadership to be more active. Their role was fundamentally divided; while
they encouraged more workers to get involved in the struggle, they also pushed
their backwards line of trade-unionism, and opposed the initiative of the
workers with technocratic decision-making and “leadership.” This became a key
aspect of the struggle.

Comrades, workers, and student contacts worked together to plan a protest at
another all-night event. Union leadership decided that it was time for them to
take a “leading role” in the struggle, and called a union meeting to discuss
contract negotiations, promote the protest—which they falsely claimed to have
thought up—and to formally assert their position as the leaders of the
struggle. A few comrades were able to attend this meeting, which began with
union leadership sharing their “expert knowledge” on the current state of the
contract negotiations with the rank-and-file workers. They did this by taking
up almost all the meeting to dispute the legal minutia of management’s claims.
Trade-unionist “leadership” of this sort, pushes the rank-and-file workers to
play “follow the leader.”

During the meeting, one worker—a known spy for management—argued that the
workers should just give up and accept whatever management offered them, lest
they anger the managers. In response to these vitriolic anti-worker statements,
other workers defended the strategy of organized resistance to the oppression
they face daily at the workplace. The comrades who attended the meeting play an
important role in challenging the reactionary orientation of the spy, and
promoting a proletarian line.

At the protest of the all-night event there was a significant increase in
worker and student participation, and some comrades from other cities attended.
This quantitative increase in participation also came with new challenges, in
particular, a much stronger presence of union leadership and their supporters,
who sought to push the protest in a reformist direction. This led to struggle
over the direction of the event overall, with union leadership consistently
turning the event into a display for the crowd, while the advanced workers,
comrades, and students pushed for more focus on internal political development
and on increasing the level of confrontation with management. Comrades pushed
for a more revolutionary character at protests through numerous interventions.
These actions highlighted the stories and advanced political ideas of the
workers, presented revolutionary ideas, and reorganized the location and
division of labor at the protest.

By putting proletarian politics in command we were able to clarify lines of
demarcation between reformist and revolutionary politics, among the workers and
contacts. Several outsiders, who identified as “leftists”—and some cases even
as communists—engaged briefly with our efforts. However, this and other events
clarified the differences between “left”-politics as usual, and the difficult
realities of communist organizing in the U.S. at this moment. These “leftist”
people soon lost interest when their fantasies of quick victories in the
struggle were confronted with the objective situation and the need for
sustained political work to develop proletarian consciousness and build
proletarian power among the working-class. The events highlighted the necessity
of collective action, accountability, and struggle in order to overcome the
ideological dominance of trade-unionism and other forms of “left politics as
usual.” A professed comrade dropped out of the struggle when faced with the
necessity of resolving differences through collective discussion and debate.
Others though were enthusiastic to engage in principled politics.

A few days after this large protest, one worker was fired and another was
placed on final written warning, presumably to retaliate against the growing
protests. These two workers did not attend the protest, so it is likely that
this was a tactic used by management to instill fear and garner negative
sentiment against those who were more politically active. To counteract these
reactionary tactics, we reached out to the worker who was placed on final
warning and coordinated a protest the next day against these measures. This
helped to clarify the stakes of the protests, and demonstrated the importance
of standing up for the interests of all the workers, even if they had yet to
get involved.

Shortly after this, we put on an event with the help of a progressive
intellectual from a nearby university, in which the workers and a comrade
shared their experiences. This event primarily served as a means to clarify
relative political stands and promote initiative among the workers. Some
workers put forward the line that their struggle was not reducible to the
economics of a new contract, and that, depending on the content, contracts
themselves can play a positive or negative role in the class struggle. Others
shared their experiences of brutal oppression and put forward mixed ideas about
the way forward. Union leadership claimed that the situation at the workplace
was primarily an economic struggle for a better contract. Discussion with
workers who attended the event highlighted these different analyses and lines,
and promoted the need for democratic discussion and debate to clarify relative
positions and discern a way forward in the struggle. This position was in
contrast to that of union leadership who implicitly advocated that workers
simply play “follow the leader.”

At this point, we encouraged contacts to plan subsequent events as part of
a build-up to a strike. A few voices in union leadership entertained this
approach in statements at protests and in discussions with us and fellow
workers. In retrospect, such statements were revealed to be situation-specific
posturing, that served to buttress their image as militant, while concealing
their real conciliatory stand. At a subsequent protest, two-line struggle with
union-leadership over the nature and direction of the demonstration played out
again. This culminated in two comrades and one worker using a banner to block
vehicles exiting the facility. Other comrades and workers cheered them on, but
union leadership attempted to rope them back onto the sidewalk. This high
point, though, was just on the cusp of a reversal.

On November 30th union leadership attended what was supposed to be an
arbitration meeting over management’s illegal decision to unilaterally change
the workers’ schedules, forcing them to come into work two hours early and
stand in the dark until the workplace opened for business. However, instead of
attending this arbitration meeting, union leadership met with management and
worked out a back-door contract deal. The contract cleared the disciplinary
records of all of union leadership (the vast majority of whom had been placed
on final written warnings on phony charges), provided a slightly better wage
agreement than the last contract offer, and reinstated the most recently fired
worker.

The union leadership agreed to sell this contract to the rank-and-file as
a victory. This sales pitch highlighted the role we played in helping to obtain
a relatively better offer. We agree that our involvement helped to pressure
management and secure a relatively improved deal for the union. However, the
contract did nothing to address the major issues in the workplace, such as the
oppressive disciplinary tactics used by management, the subcontracted scabs,
and the under-staffing. What’s more, while this contract erased the
disciplinary records of the union “leaders,” it didn’t eliminate the phony
charges brought against dozens of rank-and-file workers. There was little time
to discuss these issues because the union leaders had agreed to hold the
contract ratification vote five days after receiving this offer. This was
despite the fact that the union constitution called for a minimum of two weeks
between an offer and a ratification vote. In order to further silence
discussion and debate, the so-called-leaders refused to share the details of
the contract with the members until the day of the vote, but repeatedly
insisted that this contract was a “great victory.” We met with workers who
disagreed with the contract and formulated a response, focusing on the need for
more time and for an open all-around discussion of the terms of the contract.
Despite holding protests, passing out a handout written by two workers that
called for democratic discussion of the contract, and having numerous
discussions with workers about the issues, the ‘sugar-coated bullet’ contract
was voted in, with just a few workers voting against it.

Lessons Learned and the Way Forward

The ratification of the contract transformed the situation at the workplace.
Objectively, it weakened the workers’ power. It was an economically worse
contract than their prior one, and it eliminated their ability to legally
strike or call for a boycott. Subjectively, at present, many of the workers
feel that they have won, and therefore do not have to take further action, at
least until the next round of contract negotiations a few years in the future.
In our view, this subjective disposition will begin to change as management
continues their union-busting tactics, and oppresses the workers to greater and
greater degrees. We are currently working to develop greater unity with the
workers with whom we organized throughout the struggle, as well as the students
and other contacts who played a positive role in the struggle. This must occur
through discussion, debate, study, and political practice. We are also planning
to link-up and share experiences with workers at this and other locations as
well as with those involved in other mass struggles .

The process of the struggle was complicated and impeded by our internal
confusion over the terms of victory, and by a lack of clarity about the
importance of building up proletarian organization beyond the immediate
engagement. Several cadres and contacts failed to differentiate between the
success of the development of proletarian force and the outcome of the workers’
struggle. This led them to see the contract vote as an abject failure. The
relative isolation of the positive forces in the situation—both in terms of the
dominance of trade unionism, and the lack of revolutionary forces more
broadly—made short-term defeats in the overall struggle in the union somewhat
inevitable.

After the union voted in the contract, a few comrades even asked “does the
betrayal of union leadership mean that our struggle was lost?” The answer
should be a resounding no. This questioning reflects a lack of clarity of the
key tasks at hand. A setback in a particular struggle can occur concurrently
with a deepening of political commitment and clarity, and with a consolidation
of greater forces to the proletarian pole. Our struggle is a long and difficult
one, and the road to victory is not paved with success after success, but
instead with the disciplined work of many revolutionaries and members of the
masses, guided by materialist analysis of our successes and failures.

In the course of the struggle, we were not clear enough that such defeats could
occur concurrently with the overall development and qualitative growth of
positive forces within the movement. Our collective success in these endeavors
is visible in the foundation of ongoing mass work and organization that did not
join the camp of the union leadership’s economist politics. Clarity on the
nature of sustained growth in the creation of proletarian power was and is
essential.

The process of building proletarian organization is separate from, but
dialectically related to, the development of mass links through involvement in
the struggles of the masses. Building a powerful and ideologically unified
proletarian political organization strengthens our ability to participate in
the struggles of the masses and make concrete gains. Victories in mass
struggles demonstrate the basis of organizing for proletarian revolution.
However, to fuse these two separate processes into a single unified process is
to substitute an idealist dialectic for a materialist one. Without clarity on
this point, every setback in mass struggles appears as a setback in the
proletarian struggle, even when this is objectively not the case. In the
workplace struggle, the workers ultimately voted for a contract that weakens
their fighting power, and now that the union has a contract, its leadership is
opposing protests and demonstrations. This is clearly a setback and defeat in
the local situation. Nonetheless, the fact that a number of workers stood their
ground and took a stand against this sugar-coated-bullet was a victory of
a different sort. It reflected a deeper unity with these workers, built through
regular meetings together, and the early formation of a united-front
organization with them and other workers and students.

All of this constitutes a modest but significant advance in the organizational
capacity of proletarian forces in Boston. Through continued two-line struggle,
study, and organizing efforts we can engage with other workers at this
workplace and throughout the city. This is all the more necessary because even
our contacts who took strong proletarian stands at other times deviated toward
opportunism. Through pursuing two-line struggle at all times and avoiding the
temptation to fetishize those who, at times put forward advanced ideas as “the
advanced” we were able to bring forward the correct ideas of masses and put
proletarian politics into practice. We are also learning from the set-backs in
this struggle and promoting the need for a revolutionary politics to address
the contradictions of capitalism.

We are now more clear that the development of proletarian organization is
separate from but dialectically related to the development of mass struggles.
We go forward having learned from our failures and seeking to apply these
lessons in our future practice. This clarity is opposed to right-opportunist
deviation which sees existing organization as the basis of emerging proletarian
power, and hence tries primarily to win over the leadership of such groups.
This sort of fetishization of existing organization fails to account for the
objective reality that—with exceptions—the advanced members of the masses are
often divided and weakened precisely by the leadership of such organizations.
The role of revolutionaries is to create a basis for proletarian power, not to
opportunistically cozy-up to the appointed leadership of a “leftist” or
trade-unionist organization. In the case of our political work, there was
a need to work with the advanced workers to create a minority opposition to the
backwards politics and trade-unionist line endorsed by the union leadership.
Given their backwards political orientation, there is no basis to believe that
focusing our efforts on the union leadership would win them over to
a proletarian political line anytime soon.

Putting politics in command means that organization should be a tool for
political development. Thus, developing political participation and proletarian
subjectivity is primary over growing membership. This understanding guided us
in our engagement with outside forces, and is in contradiction with the
approach of getting people to “sign up” for a mass organization, or to “listen
to leadership.”

As Maoists, our central task is to build powerful pre-party formations and
eventually a Maoist party here in the U.S.—a proletarian class organization
that promotes mass-line politics and is dialectically related to mass struggles
in a manner that spurs the independent revolutionary initiative of the
thousands and millions of members of the masses. However, this process is
a dividing line in the struggle, and needs to be seen as primary over the
economic victories achieved through organizing efforts. To say otherwise is to
lapse into the economism and a vulgar form of “productive forces determinism.”

The mass-line we are describing was synthesized by Mao’s work in 1942, and is
what allows the masses to truly make history, through spawning revolutionary
power everywhere. In the present we can see this process occurring in the work
of the Maoists in India. However, in the U.S. and elsewhere there is still
a great deal of confusion over the mass line. The mass line is not reducible to
improving our ability to serve the material needs of mass contacts, nor is it
reducible to conducting agitation, propaganda, and education among the masses.
Engaging with the advanced elements among the masses, winning victories in
concrete struggles, and promoting proletarian subjectivity are all key
preconditions to practicing mass line politics, and should be conducted by all
Maoist collectives. However, concentrating the correct ideas of the masses on
the scale necessary for the masses to make history is not objectively possible
at present in the U.S. Qualitatively transforming a situation in a manner that
furthers proletarian power is not the same thing as “making history.” Without
a Maoist party with deep ties among the masses, we must focus our efforts on
building the preconditions for a mass line politics.

We can only make qualitative advances toward the creation of pre-party
formations through developing a concrete understanding of this political
conjuncture in the U.S.—which is marked by the lack of a viable communist
party—and through understanding that such a party must built through putting
into practice the dialectical relation between mass-work and cadre development.
Clarity on this point, is necessary to understand the present basis for
a proletarian politics that advances towards revolution and communism.